People are sooo afraid of any new tech that comes. First they were so mad at NFTs but slowly they understood and even tho many still hate it, the hate will for sure die down once we are able to use it somewhere else and see the value.
I see the same reaction with AI. Just cos it’s new and we haven’t even seen how this tool can be used in its full potential everyone went nuts.
No matter how great the visuals an AI generated art looks, it’s just an output without a soul built upon the works of artists in learned from.
This is why I’m really not concerned about AI as a competition. It is powerful as a tool, some results look amazing.. but I don’t think clients would be replacing the artists for AI. AI still is not capable of thinking on its own, even when you put a specific prompt it’s not 100% gonna be able to visualize what you want. I get that it may be the struggle of artists to earn that they’re over reacting to the existence of AI but I really don’t think they’ll be replaced lol.
I don’t mind my works used for training it either. We all draw what already exists, we mimic all the time. No point not allowing tools when we do it all the time anyway.
I view the resistance from a perspective of people unaware about blockchain tech works and other applications. NFTs are like digital signatures made by the artists in unique strings of codes but their vision is limited to the PNG/JPEG/SVG file. We know it's more than that. I think what they often see as bad NFTs are those that do pollute the space and marketed more focused on profit than memorabilia in digital form. We have electronic signatures on official documents in scribble forms but those can be forged, with NFTs, the signature of the artists can be verified.
It's still on discovery mode until things settle down and new types of artists emerge. When I tried doing some prompts for an idea, I see some versions I wanted to trace first and then make some additional tweaks but more than half of the job was rendered by AI. I didn't think about this at first but it really makes things convenient like having the AI be on autocorrect for your canvas yet you still compose the rest of the paragraph that way you want.
It's unlikely going to replace artists but it's going to demand more specialized artists in the seen. AI artist specialists will be in demand and its going to be a new niche on its own under the digital art category. But to be even correcting AI, one must know already be an expert on what they are trying to correct.
The part where AI art crosses the line is permission from the works used for its training. I don't mine my works being used for AI training, generally, but I'd like to know the 3rd parties that are going to use it and what for. Some part of the issue is money, could artists be compensated with royalties if the AI art generates income because it used the artists' works?
This is the part where DeviantArt triggered the drama, they should have surveyed the crowd sentiment and by default make the opting in voluntary because some artists really just don't want to support AI art for different reasons than blanket implement a feature and expect everyone to be ok with it.